The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Snippets and meta descriptions have brand-new character limits, and it's a big change for Google and SEOs alike. Learn about what's new, when it changed, and what it all means for SEO in this edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about Google's big change to the snippet length.

This is the display length of the snippet for any given result in the search results that Google provides. This is on both mobile and desktop. It sort of impacts the meta description, which is how many snippets are written. They're taken from the meta description tag of the web page. Google essentially said just last week, "Hey, we have officially increased the length, the recommended length, and the display length of what we will show in the text snippet of standard organic results."

So I'm illustrating that for you here. I did a search for "net neutrality bill," something that's on the minds of a lot of Americans right now. You can see here that this article from The Hill, which is a recent article — it was two days ago — has a much longer text snippet than what we would normally expect to find. In fact, I went ahead and counted this one and then showed it here.

So basically, at the old 165-character limit, which is what you would have seen prior to the middle of December on most every search result, occasionally Google would have a longer one for very specific kinds of search results, but more than 90%, according to data from SISTRIX, which put out a great report and I'll link to it here, more than 90% of search snippets were 165 characters or less prior to the middle of November. Then Google added basically a few more lines.

So now, on mobile and desktop, instead of an average of two or three lines, we're talking three, four, five, sometimes even six lines of text. So this snippet here is 266 characters that Google is displaying. The next result, from Save the Internet, is 273 characters. Again, this might be because Google sort of realized, "Hey, we almost got all of this in here. Let's just carry it through to the end rather than showing the ellipsis." But you can see that 165 characters would cut off right here. This one actually does a good job of displaying things.

So imagine a searcher is querying for something in your field and they're just looking for a basic understanding of what it is. So they've never heard of net neutrality. They're not sure what it is. So they can read here, "Net neutrality is the basic principle that prohibits internet service providers like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon from speeding up, slowing down, or blocking any . . ." And that's where it would cut off. Or that's where it would have cut off in November.

Now, if I got a snippet like that, I need to visit the site. I've got to click through in order to learn more. That doesn't tell me enough to give me the data to go through. Now, Google has tackled this before with things, like a featured snippet, that sit at the top of the search results, that are a more expansive short answer. But in this case, I can get the rest of it because now, as of mid-November, Google has lengthened this. So now I can get, "Any content, applications, or websites you want to use. Net neutrality is the way that the Internet has always worked."

Now, you might quibble and say this is not a full, thorough understanding of what net neutrality is, and I agree. But for a lot of searchers, this is good enough. They don't need to click any more. This extension from 165 to 275 or 273, in this case, has really done the trick.

What changed?

So this can have a bunch of changes to SEO too. So the change that happened here is that Google updated basically two things. One, they updated the snippet length, and two, they updated their guidelines around it.

So Google's had historic guidelines that said, well, you want to keep your meta description tag between about 160 and 180 characters. I think that was the number. They've updated that to where they say there's no official meta description recommended length. But on Twitter, Danny Sullivan said that he would probably not make that greater than 320 characters. In fact, we and other data providers, that collect a lot of search results, didn't find many that extended beyond 300. So I think that's a reasonable thing.

When?

When did this happen? It was starting at about mid-November. November 22nd is when SISTRIX's dataset starts to notice the increase, and it was over 50%. Now it's sitting at about 51% of search results that have these longer snippets in at least 1 of the top 10 as of December 2nd.

Here's the amazing thing, though — 51% of search results have at least one. Many of those, because they're still pulling old meta descriptions or meta descriptions that SEO has optimized for the 165-character limit, are still very short. So if you're the person in your search results, especially it's holiday time right now, lots of ecommerce action, if you're the person to go update your important pages right now, you might be able to get more real estate in the search results than any of your competitors in the SERPs because they're not updating theirs.

How will this affect SEO?

So how is this going to really change SEO? Well, three things:

A. It changes how marketers should write and optimize the meta description.

We're going to be writing a little bit differently because we have more space. We're going to be trying to entice people to click, but we're going to be very conscientious that we want to try and answer a lot of this in the search result itself, because if we can, there's a good chance that Google will rank us higher, even if we're actually sort of sacrificing clicks by helping the searcher get the answer they need in the search result.

B. It may impact click-through rate.

We'll be looking at Jumpshot data over the next few months and year ahead. We think that there are two likely ways they could do it. Probably negatively, meaning fewer clicks on less complex queries. But conversely, possible it will get more clicks on some more complex queries, because people are more enticed by the longer description. Fingers crossed, that's kind of what you want to do as a marketer.

C. It may lead to lower click-through rate further down in the search results.

If you think about the fact that this is taking up the real estate that was taken up by three results with two, as of a month ago, well, maybe people won't scroll as far down. Maybe the ones that are higher up will in fact draw more of the clicks, and thus being further down on page one will have less value than it used to.

What should SEOs do?

What are things that you should do right now? Number one, make a priority list — you should probably already have this — of your most important landing pages by search traffic, the ones that receive the most search traffic on your website, organic search. Then I would go and reoptimize those meta descriptions for the longer limits.

Now, you can judge as you will. My advice would be go to the SERPs that are sending you the most traffic, that you're ranking for the most. Go check out the limits. They're probably between about 250 and 300, and you can optimize somewhere in there.

The second thing I would do is if you have internal processes or your CMS has rules around how long you can make a meta description tag, you're going to have to update those probably from the old limit of somewhere in the 160 to 180 range to the new 230 to 320 range. It doesn't look like many are smaller than 230 now, at least limit-wise, and it doesn't look like anything is particularly longer than 320. So somewhere in there is where you're going to want to stay.

Good luck with your new meta descriptions and with your new snippet optimization. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

One important note that a lot of folks have been asking about -- yes, it's true that Google is pulling many of the snippet texts from the web page content rather than the meta description tag. But, IMO, that doesn't invalidate meta description optimization, it just makes the bar higher. If you want to get Google to use your meta description, you need that tag to be:

Useful to searchers, which means it might do a lot to answer the searcher's query right in the snippet, and bring down clicks, but this is a tradeoff you make for a potentially higher ranking position. If you don't do it, one of your competitors likely will.

Perceived as relevant by Google, which means it uses text and content that Google's systems will associate with solving the query

The right length, which means Google can pull it and display it in the SERPs effectively (my guess is that too short or too long may cause issues here)

Employing words and phrases that Google (and searchers) want to see in the form of phrases/sentences that tackle the core of what searchers are seeking from the result. Just jamming keywords in isn't going to work (as anyone who's tried recently knows well)

My advice (in the video and here) is to do this first for your most important and most search-traffic-earning pages, then move on to the longer tail of your content.

Thank you Rand for talking also about page content on Meta. It's not so easy as we assume what Google do on Meta description area. I believe, we will get more clarity in early 2018. Awesome video topic :)

A Q? Related to this WhiteBoard Friday / Google Meta Description character count increase. On the Moz Pro Reports where "New Issue Alerts" are sited when a Meta Desc is too LONG or too SHORT based on Moz's parameters based on the old 'standards' ( Moz advices > 55 < 160 ) will the parameters of that report be changed ( SOON? ) so that a Meta Desc in excess of 160 ( in our client base and give our agency's advertising vertical this occurs regularly based on a technique of auto-populating the Meta Description. IF Moz no longer sited as an 'Issue' cases where the Meta Description is longer than 160 ( by 'design' ) than this report referenced would no longer report these occurrences.

Just a quick update for those following the thread. We've updated the rules in Moz campaigns for both site crawl and on-page analysis to warn you only when meta descriptions are over 300 characters. This should be reflected in all of your latest crawls and reports. If you're interested in why we landed on 300 characters, check out Dr. Pete's meta description research that informed htis limit.

Thank you so much for this whiteboard friday. We've been able to perform a form of auto-update to some of our products meta dsecriptions for a test by appending a relevant compatibility list toward the end of each description.

If you (or Igor) would like to pay me on a per webpage basis, I'd be happy to wordsmith enhanced, more robust, meta descriptions for you...show me the money baby ...i CAN be bought. "We" are testing some ideas already ;-)

Thanks for this update Rand. I'll be testing to see how this impacts things for sure.

I can see how this will be useful for searchers where, for a given search, Google dynamically pulls in the text from the relevant portion of the page (rather than showing the meta description info) and the users' query is satisfied without them needing clicking through to the site. Ouch for the site owners though.

I think there's an opportunity (with the increased character space) to write more enticing copy now, and you're at a disadvantage if you don't!

I've seen these long snippets in the SERP and tried to understand, but you've finally given me an explanation. But now I'm wondering whether there will be an update to the Yoast SEO plugin that's still giving a red light for meta descriptions over 165 characters? Anyone that knows if it's in the pipeline?

Exactly, Peggy! When do people think there will be an update to the Yoast or All in One SEO plugins? I have the latter on two sites I manage and it won't publish anything past 160 chars. Frustrating! Editing or updating the plugin is not my department (and unfortunately no-one in my team knows how to change this.)

Please, anyone have any advice/info on how to edit/update these SEO plugins??

Some webmasters and SEOs may consider updating their meta descriptions, but I don’t believe Google would recommend doing so. The snippets are more often dynamically generated based on the user query and content found in both the meta description and the content visible on the page. If Google is going to go with a longer snippet, it likely will pull that content from the page.

I 'tested' this, immediately, on Friday. I took an existing page that had a Meta Description of 156 characters and changed it to 301. Today, Monday, the page has been reindexed and not to differ with Memli's analysis, but, when the same Google Search string was submitted after the change was implemented, Google displayed the entire 301 character search straight from the expanded Meta Description. Although Google MAY chose to take 'snippets', bits and pieces of information from the page and display that for the user, they did not. Google displayed the entire 301 character Meta Description, verbatim, from the HTML that I updated on Friday.

Thanks Rand! I thing since longer snippets will be dynamically generated when the situation calls for it, SEOs and site owners do not have to change anything when it comes to optimizing meta descriptions.

We don't *have* to, but I believe it's worth your time if you can capture the snippet with your meta description. Controlling that information is valuable for conveying what you want in the best possible way in the SERPs.

See example I / we tested - between White Board Friday and today. My reply, sited above, in response to another comment in this thread. I / we updated and tested an expanded 300+ character Meta Description on an existing page and today, Google is displaying it in SERP in it's entirety as updated.

And that's one of the things that makes SEO so fascinating. Something is always changing and evolving, and those who adapt faster gain their competitive advantage.

Having said that, no need to cancel all plans for next week. Just as Rand said, make a priority. Start with the top pages only, test a few different versions, and first see what it does in your specific industry.

Its so funny! I was updating a client's website yesterday and noticed this dramatic shift in meta description length! I wondered if this was isolated etc..Wouldn't you know it, the very next day, the Wizard of Moz makes a WBF post addressing it! Thank you!

I just worry that this is just a whim by Google and will revert back to shorter meat description results again soon. Any chance of that happening?

When I was starting in the world of Seo I was really obsessed, with snipped optimization and keyword optimization and so on.

Now I prefer to focus on the content and the user needs.

As I see and understand Google is just trying to give to the user's more specific search results.

If someone asks a question to Google, it will try to give the best answer possible at the first time. If any page, site, fan page or whatever meets those criteria, then Google will put it in the first place. On the other hand, if that page does not meet the search query intent "answer the question" then that page will not be in the first place.

No matter the description, or the on-page optimization, or the schemas.

So I think is very simple, don't waste your time leave your meta description alone and create a good content.

I think the CTR will be low as users might get answers without visiting the page. It would be beneficial to use schemas to make your overall result look more eye catching. I've seen links in meta descriptions and some sites even display WordPress tags as links in their search results. I am not sure how do they do it but if you can manage to do it then definitely high CTR for you.

Thanks for this important update. Now I understand why for some time now Google wasn't using our description tag and was pulling text from the top of the page instead. Be interesting to see how this impacts CTR.

So interesting! I first saw this way back on OCT 1 while checking on my highest-ranking post. [took a screenshot because I thought the snippet length was oddly long] Google displayed 287 characters at that time, and pulled the content from my post, ignoring my meta.

I searched again tonight and now Google is displaying 324 characters for the same post.

Thanks Rand for clarifying all of this. I think this is a great opportunity for smart SEOs.

I have been very busy with late season clients. Today I attended a webinar - 30 minutes - while working. I catched the news on regard the meta descriptions. Next step was coming to Moz to verify and learn from you.

From a user prospective, I now spend less time bouncing out of websites that are in the top three positions, because the new longer and better description means I'm finding what I want lower down in the page and getting it right on the first click - I love saving time.

From an SEO's prospective, with the type of clients I work with this is fantastic news because I can now include relevant information I've had to leave out so far.

The result of savetheinternet actually has a long meta description provided in the source code, still Google seems to prefer a custom meta description that is totally different (and perhaps more relevant) than the one provided. How many times will Google show your own provided meta description over a more relevant custom one created by Google itself? And is it therefore really worth the effort to update all meta descriptions?

I've been Designing/Developing and in the process, optimizing sites since about the time google went public. These were the days of the wild west where anything went. Packing keywords in the same color on the background etcetera. Back in the late 90's I was impressed when google insisted on relevant content and fair play to give the user/customer SERPs relevant to their search terms. This lead to ground rules that made SEO a profession. I'm retired now and have noticed a shifting away from delivering information strictly relevant to the search terms. Now it's more relevant to what google thinks you should have. I've notice that before I almost never had to go beyond the 1st page to get the information I was searching. Now it's almost always filled with opinions about the info I'm looking for. I now have to wade thru all the speculation and pontificating about what I'm looking for. Example: Out of curiosity I too did a search about Net Neutrality. I hit F11 to get as much real estate as possible. I got 3 columns of Top Stories about how dis-functional one is to be counter to Net Neutrality movement. 3 columns of Twitter spats about who the worst person was for not thinking like the other. And That is it! Rand's assertion that searchers will get what they want in the new tag and move on with out having to go to the site is a horror story to this SEOer. The whole purpose SEO is to get the visitor to the site and them keeping them there. Discouraging visitor to visit sites implies google is more interested in keeping you on their site. Hmmm, more ad revenue for google maybe, I don't know. What I do know it that google's SERPs no-longer delivery purely relevant content. In fact they seem to have devolved towards that to which they fought against in the beginning. One thing is for sure, I'm glad I retired.

I'm not completely sure what to think of the longer character limit. I might try it out on a few articles and see if a longer meta description really is beneficial but so far I also made the experience that Google sometimes also does not use my Meta Description but rather some part of the article (same as with the snippets) so I am not completely sure if a longer character limit is the answer to all of this...

WHY is that a bad thing!? Because someones useless KPI will go down? "Duh, less visits due to us answering that search intent via metas..." Now that user will NEVER click through, read that stuff on your site - and conv... bounce. Because he just wanted to know what's LARP. Damn, now he'll never buy the AmazonFresh sub, the latest F-16 upgrade or car insurance we wanted to sell!

See it as a pre-funnel. Just think about what you can do with 230+ chars to qualify someone. Or as me olde billboard bosse said: "Every message you can't put into three simple words is shit..."

Is there any research that shows whether people actually read the description tag entirely or focus mainly on the title tag? I'm wondering if this longer title would only help Google define the purpose of a page more and not have much impact on what the user reads? If this is the case then this will really benefit the listings at the top of the first page since people won't look as far down the page since it's longer.

It is very sure now Google Search Result will lengthy compare to previous results.

If user is getting all information from our meta, surely the CTR will go down

One thing I need to understand, if we still have the description with 165 character, will search engine dynamically add the remain 60-80 character from my web page, if my meta's aren't update ? or will it just replace my SERP's with my competitor. If so, this way will also loss earned SERP'S. !

Love the insight here Rand! We have been going back in and updating our Meta Descriptions to be about twice as long as what we had them before (usually ending up around 275-300 characters), and have already seen our new descriptions showing up in SERPs. This definitely makes your listing pop out more having 3-4 lines as the meta description instead of 1-2. It will be interesting to see how these changes affect CTR for web pages that increase their meta description length (possible future WBF? I think so..)

I've been testing this via Amazon's Mechanical Turk (via Serp Turkey) for a few months now. Not sure why you think this was just made live last month. I still have the archived tests to refer to and test results from the extended snippets. Google is very selective with which search results get the additional characters.

I tested a few keywords which showed the test site with rich snippet reviews, pricing, qty, etc and even though my listing had 7 lines it did not perform as well as a shorter, keyword infused description. I would recommend everyone do their own testing but there are many case studies out there (SEO Intelligence Agency has repeatedly tested character length in SERPS also) but generally, shorter descriptions with multiple occurrences of the keyword phrase and LSI terms outperform descriptions that are near or at the character limit.

So, sorry Rand but no, this character limit update by Google does not mean we should optimize and change our descriptions. If anything, this gives those of us who know and understand Google users' searching habits the advantage as those who take the advice in this Whiteboard and try to edit description to increase length are most likely going to be hurting their optimization and potential click through.

Honestly, you should not be making recommendations without performing tests with demonstrable results. A/B testing is not difficult.

I just found a page on my site that is in the number 2 position for a long tail KW where the description tag was put together from some text on the page and the balance is not anywhere on my site. Looks like it could be from a review somewhere.

I'm wondering what is the best way to handle this--write new description tags or just let Google pick the text it thinks is best and let their algo make the decision. This whole thing keeps getting more complex and needs to be tested out. Rand, I hope that your team is testing all these variables.

I wonder how this will affect click through rate for eCommerce, since a searcher who is looking to buy will not stop at a search result page no matter how much info they are provided with - in which case, what do you really want to include in the meta information? More "answer" content, or more CTA content to attract paying visits? Or a combination of both?

The new range of 230 - 320 seems to be a huge range of characters to be "testing" out where you have 90 characters of "wiggle room".

Do we know if this is a permanent update? Or possibly something that Google is "officially releasing" but secretly testing (like the author images that used to show up in search results).

I noticed some people are saying they plan on keeping their current (approx 160 characters) optimized meta descriptions and adding on an additional message to get the meta description to the 230 - 320 range. That sounds reasonable, in case Google decides to switch back to around the 160 meta description range, but doesn't that also run the risk of having your meta descriptions ignored for being too long or getting the dreaded ellipsis in mid sentence?

I've also noticed many 160 character or less meta descriptions being ignored on pages with robust content...it'll definitely be interesting to test out the longer meta descriptions on pages like these to see if Google would still ignore the meta descriptions or continue to pull from the text. I know a few people have claimed they've successfully accomplished this...but seeing is believing...if anyone has proof (picture of video evidence) I'd love to see it in action.

Hi Rand, funny enough since this change our impression is higher, the number of the clicks is higher but nevertheless the CTR is 50% lower and the conversion rate is the same. I'm curious how this will change ranking for our products, but we're about to change our meta descriptions, so the fun is about to begin :)

I saw some Twitter replies saying the same -- will be interesting to watch over time for sure. I suspect as searchers get more comfortable with it, we'll see the true long term results (fewer or more clicks, status quo, more searches per searcher, etc).

mmmmm... Thanks for the video Rand. Is it just me or Google secretly would rather we don't write meta descriptions. I mean when I think about it, I feel that if I was Google, it's better if I pulled the text from the page because then I know for 100% that this page is about X. This way, they can easily see which is useless using your suggestions (the most non-scroll gaze time). If SEOs write the description, then there's potential for error (algorithmic wise)... thoughts?

Pulling from the product pages isn't always useful, as that may not provide a summary of what the page is about, what it answers and why you should go there. I think Google knows that, and they also know to avoid using provided meta descriptions when they clearly aren't relevant. (Has Google ever used a meta description that didn't include a single search query term when there was available text on the page that did?)

"we want to try and answer a lot of this in the search result itself, because if we can, there's a good chance that Google will rank us higher, even if we're actually sort of sacrificing clicks by helping the searcher get the answer they need in the search result."

Ok so people find the answer they are looking for directly in serp. But how can google know wich meta answered to the query if we still saw 2 or 3 meta description at the same time ?

Great question - I think on mobile, this is relatively easier for Google than on desktop, since the scroll position generally can only show one SERP completely with the new length (especially on smaller screen phones). For desktop, there's also an average position for scrolling and viewing, so Google can still likely figure out which result is answering the query by what gets the most non-scroll gaze time (and where clicks go when they do go somewhere, too).

Thanks for this post! Just this week, Moz Pro's Site Crawl Issues told me that a meta description with 161 was flagged as too long. Here's the warning/advice it gave on Wednesday Dec 6: "“Reduce the length of your meta description. The ideal length is 55-160 characters.”

Hopefully the Moz Campaigns were already updated so that they won't start flagging every new increased meta description, but it's nice to know the new numbers preferred and allowed.

Excellent point! We are going to be updating this rule in the crawl early next week. Dr. Pete is doing a quick analysis on our Mozcast data set to further inform the new limit that we are going to recommend.

As a user, I have to say that I don't like that change at all. I just don't need so much text. When I search for something I quickly scan the title, the URL, the first few words from the description, and decide if it's relevant enough or not.

I can think of a few topics, in which it's completely unnecessary, such as specific items to buy, prices of financial instruments, and a few more searches where I'm not expecting to get articles in the results.

I tried the "Net neutrality bill" search, and the mobile SERPs page is now extremely long! If I would have to guess, I'd say that positions 4 to 8 would suffer the most.

I think we'll start with the top pages we rank 1-3 for, test a few options, brainstorm with PPC and Copywriting, and take it from there.

By the way, just as before, Google often gets longer texts from the page itself and not the meta description. I just saw a few examples, including the Save the Internet example you used Rand, where the meta description has a different text entirely.

Yup - see my replies to other comments on this and my comment on the post for more, but basically, not many descriptions are long enough now, and many aren't working hard enough to do what Google wants -- answer the search query in the description as much as possible.

Great WBF! What confuses me though is the relevancy of the meta-description in SERP's today. When I do a search on eg. 'cleaning red wine stains', I do get a couple of SERP's with a longer snippet. But the content almost all of these snippets show is not coming from the meta-description itself, but pulled out of the context of the content on that page.

How can one optimize content, taking into account the longer snippet size?

Two things are happening right now - one, it's harder and harder to get a meta description that Google believes is more relevant than the on-page text. This is partially because many sites try to make their meta descriptions salesy or click-drawing rather than search-query-answering. The second is because almost no one has had time (yet) to optimize their descriptions for the new length, so naturally Google's going to be pulling from text until folks write longer/better/more relevant meta descriptions.

I look at it from a different angle, so Google doesn't value meta description tag, it fetches the content from the page description according to user's search query. Thus making an effort to change the meta description for your pages wouldn't be that fruitful. Thoughts?

I know that google will point to an improved user experience, but the cynic in me thinks that fewer clicks, and fewer results in the same amount of serp real estate might drive more companies to pay for their clicks. After all, large companies like Google have large revenue growth goals.

Interesting things happening in the SERPs for sure. I’m intrigued by your recommendation to rewrite meta desc. especially after reading Danny Sullivan’s tweet about not going out and rewriting them because the process is dynamic.

I see 2 primary outcomes from this, more clicks on ads because users could be overwhelmed by more text in organic links and fewer above fold organic links, or cannilization of traffic primarily for informational queries where the user finds the answer without clicking, a la answer box results with the full answer displayed.

Timely video Rand. I was talking about this exact thing yesterday with a colleague. I've recently seen descriptions displayed in search results vary in length and content, often based on the query.

I hate the idea of longer meta descriptions. SERPS will become less scannable and cluttered. That said, it seems worth testing new, longer meta descriptions in order to have any hope of influencing what is displayed, If it impacts rankings, then it absolutely makes sense to update and test.

I also think that there's something to the earlier comment about using these extended snippets to power vocal search results. I need to add Google Home to my list for Santa & start testing.

I remember talking to an SEO agency years ago that was running SEO for a company I had just joined. I asked them to tell me what their biggest wins were over the past 6 months and what future plans they had for our sites. Their answer: "Well, we're kinda in maintenance mode right now".

I'm curious how customers will respond over the idea of losing clicks in exchange for perhaps gaining rankings. Several of our customers use organic traffic as a key KPI, and this will undoubtedly cause some concern.

Good timely WBF and I agree with Rand that we should look at our most searched for pages and rewrite the description snippets for those high visibility pages. BUT it seems to me Google is creating an hybrid between title+description and Featured snippets, thus keeping users in the SERPs a little bit more. to be continued...

I always thought that keeping it short was the best (120 characters more or less). I use to read everywhere that skills for synthesis was good for my ''click through rate''... It's important to give all the necessary information but only the necessary information. Potential customer should find the required information in the blink of an eye... Now I'm not sure what to do... Should I write a longer meta with more keywords for better SEO or keep it short for better CTR?

I like your suggestion to prioritize pages for updates. We've seen Google give and take away in the past. I'd hate to charge clients to expand upon their meta descriptions only to turn around in a few months and do the opposite. It's important to let clients know nothing is ever cast in stone when it comes to Google and you're recommending a phased-approach that gives you a short-term advantage that may (or may not) go away.

Great post Rand, now firmly on the to-do list! I think a closer analysis of our top performing pages will be required and will provide the ideal starting point before we tackle the remainder of the site.

I've been contemplating on this. On one hand, a longer description might serve a strong purpose when finding clients. On the other hand, the old 160-ish limit is also good as a way to try and provide as much useful information in as little space as possible. Let's be honest, SERP is usually meant to be glanced over, and so many people do just that. I used one of the numerous page analysis tools (specifically, the WebAnalysis.tools, just because I love that cheeky use of TLD; your desc remains short!) to check a few more prominent websites that I read, and few of them have made any changes (actually, none). On the other hand, that may also show it to be a useful move. Depends on how you look at it.

Super interesting, for the company I work for we will have to reedit 650 meta descriptions now. And by the way, checking my own firms index on Google, I just spotted some descriptions of 327 and 329 characters. Fun times ahead!

Great post to clarify the extent to which we can update the Meta Desc. I only noticed this a week or two back and had already started to implement a plan offline for these updates. Now the update is live I have started to tackle as per your note the key landing pages first. I am trying to answer the query but a the same time entice users back to the site to learn more or perform an action. Great WBF as per normal.

Great WBF and I'm currently piloting the change by focusing on one content area before rolling out site wide. However, I'm just wondering will you be updating the Metadata issues report within Moz Pro to support the suggested new description character limit? As in this weeks report my description changes are being reported as too long :) nic

Great WBF! Very interesting reactions as to whether we should go ahead and increase the number of characteres in our description tags. If doing so, how and where would you integrate USP and CTA in order to avoid lower CTR?

I agree that if the snippets are too long will reduce the conversion rate. Personally, I'm looking for something only interested in title tags; Descriptions should be as short and as complete as possible. If it is too long, it will confuse the user